Stupidity

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT STUPIDITY - PAGE 2

By Laurence D. Cohen Laurence D. Cohen is a public policy consultant who served as special assistant to former Gov. John G. Rowland. His column appears every Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at cohencolumn@aol.com., November 21, 2004

When Election Day passes and the analysts have exhausted themselves, they revert to their favorite message: Boy, are you ever dumb! You know what I mean. Here's the headline in the Boston Globe on a piece by columnist Jeff Jacoby a week before the election: "The Ignorant American Voter." And of course, the academics are trotted out to report that even voters who don't live in Florida are so dumb that they can't find their way to the polls, or know that Sam Walton was the first American president, or can't remember exactly who it was that we were fighting during the Civil War. Some of the dumb-bashing has a partisan flavor.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy believes that the ill-timed maintenance procedure that caused the most recent Metro-North train service shut down was a "stupid" idea. I agree. So was his statement awhile back that all that teachers have to do is show up to get tenure. Michael E. Rosano, West Hartford

Things I am hearing way too often from NCAA tournament announcers: 1. "For coach X": The player enters the game for coach X, scores for coach X, dives on the floor for coach X -- enough for coach X. 2. "Score the basketball": Are they preparing the basketball for grilling? 3. "If you are --": If you are Coach X, if you are Player Y. Why bring me into this? Some announcers are so clever that they can fit all three into one sentence, so instead of saying "Kelly Faris needs to score some points," we get "If you are Kelly Faris, you need to score the basketball for coach Auriemma.

Spring Weekend is an ugly three-night marathon of binge-drinking, couch-burning debauchery, mostly at a big University of Connecticut parking lot and a few notorious apartment buildings off-campus. OK, not every student strives to drink to oblivion or pick a fight, but enough do that the event has gained a regional reputation for intoxicated violence. The cost is enormous — up to $200,000 in police, fire and emergency medical services, and inestimable suffering from injuries.

Much of the happy talk that passes for conversation from radio jocks these days is puerile. No one would ever mistake this 1990s prattle for the golden age of radio. At last, one host's moronic on-air prank has caught up with him. Arthur Gopen, who's known as Gary Craig on WTIC-FM in Hartford, is accused of phoning a woman at her office and identifying himself as a cable TV man who was rifling through her undergarments in her Meriden home. Mr. Craig must have thought it a hoot.

Beware of the compromise on tax cuts engineered by House Republican leaders on Monday to sway dissident members of their party. The dissidents, mostly alumni of the tax cuts a decade earlier, are haunted by that experience. President Ronald Reagan's indulgence in the supply-side economic policy of huge tax cuts without proportionate spending cuts resulted in massive deficits. The national debt exploded from less than $1 trillion to $5 trillion. To avoid the repetition of such a disaster, many House Republicans and conservative Democrats balked at Speaker Newt Gingrich's 1995 tax cuts.

There is a temptation to say something stupid. That can happen when the sun shines so warmly, so mystically on the fabled monuments in left field. That can happen when the Yankees preface each mention of their name with the haughty words, "first place." That can happen in a season where pitchers are out because of stiff left shoulders, aneurysms and arthroscopic elbow surgery, yet another pitcher re-emerges after a cocaine problem to pitch a no-hitter and reclaim a career.

Mike Barnicle has dodged a bullet. The Boston Globe metro columnist will not lose his job. Instead, he will be suspended for two months without pay for appropriating jokes written by comedian George Carlin and passing them off as his own in an Aug. 2 column. That's plenty of time to stockpile some original information. His fate was a tough call for his employer. In journalism as in academia, what Mr. Barnicle did is called plagiarism. Coming on the heels of several public breaches of journalistic ethics by other writers, including former Globe columnist Patricia Smith, Mr. Barnicle should have known better.

It's not that President Clinton doesn't know right from wrong, it's that he does wrong so right. Since being accused of having an affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, of committing perjury and of encouraging others to lie under oath, Clinton's popularity has soared. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday found that 79 percent of those questioned approved of Clinton's performance in office, up from 72 percent in late January. Is the president on to something here?

With a straight face, the top two executives of one of the world's biggest pharmaceutical conglomerates recently said they had no idea that their company was the major partner in a global price-fixing cartel for vitamins. "You will understand that this was not part of our responsibility," said Franze B. Humer, chief executive of Swiss-based Hoffmann-LaRoche Ltd. His partner, Chairman Fritz Gerber, claimed he still doesn't know what the senior executives at his company did. If Messrs.